How the AR-15 Became an American Brand | James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society | How Leaders Can Get Honest, Productive Feedback | Why you have an accent in a foreign language

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How the AR-15 Became an American Brand - The New Yorker

Last summer, when the release of the video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a single by the country-music star Jason Aldean, generated a small storm of controversy, it was mentioned, often as an aside, that Aldean had been onstage on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, in Las Vegas. That night, as Aldean performed a song called “When She Says Baby,” a man named Stephen Paddock began firing from the thirty-second floor of Mandalay Bay, a nearby resort and casino, into the crowd below. In the span of about ten minutes, Paddock shot more than a thousand bullets, killing fifty-eight people and wounding more than four hundred others before killing himself. In video recorded as the first bursts of gunfire sounded, Aldean stops singing, then flees the stage.

It was a coincidence that put Aldean in Vegas on that particular night, but releasing “Try That in a Small Town,” a song extolling vigilante justice, six years later was a choice. The music video splices together footage from anti-police protests and convenience-store robberies to form an impression of national disarray; its lyrics include the lines “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up.” Aldean left the Las Vegas massacre out of his sizzle reel of American disorder, instead projecting a fantasy of control. Watching the video last summer, I couldn’t help recalling, given Aldean’s association with a mass shooting, that one thing that was tried in a small town in recent American history was the massacre that killed nineteen children in Uvalde, Texas, last year; that law enforcement in that small town waited in the halls for an hour without confronting the shooter; that the small town’s only pediatrician later testified to Congress about identifying the dead by the cartoons on their clothes because their bodies were too damaged. Considered in this light, “Try That in a Small Town” becomes an allegory about posturing over perceived threats to national integrity while ignoring the lived reality of a horror too disturbing to mediate.

Much of the controversy over the video focussed on a shot of Aldean singing with a band in front of a courthouse in Tennessee where a Black man was lynched by a white mob in 1927. Equally remarkable, though less discussed, was the way in which the video enacted the psychological splitting of a certain kind of American gun enthusiast: his unique combination of hubris and cowardice, bravado and nihilism; his peacocking; his racism; his belief in the mythology of law and order over empirical proof of its corruption.

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James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society - The Marginalian

“The sole purpose of human existence,” Carl Jung wrote in his reflections of life and death in 1957, “is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Five years later, in one of his least well-known but most enchanting works, the great novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and cultural critic James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) argued for this existential kindling of light as the sole purpose of the artist’s life.

In a 1962 essay titled “The Creative Process,” found in the altogether fantastic anthology The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (public library), Baldwin lays out a manifesto of sorts, nuanced and dimensional yet exploding with clarity of conviction, for the trying but vital responsibility that artists, “a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead,” have to their society.

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality — a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world. There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. None of these things can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

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How Leaders Can Get Honest, Productive Feedback - Harvard Business Review

Great leaders are great learners. Their never-ending pursuit of information pushes them to constantly improve and sets them apart from the rest. Feedback serves a crucial role in this process, but getting and learning from it isn’t always easy. If you want to get the feedback that is necessary to improve your leadership, there are a few steps you can take. First, build and maintain a psychologically safe environment. Sharing feedback is often interpersonally risky. To increase the likelihood of your colleagues taking that risk with you, show them that their honesty is valued. You can do this by asking open-ended questions like, “What did you hear when I shared my strategy?” or “How did it feel to you when I sent that email?” Next, be sure to ask for both positive and negative feedback. Listen carefully when receiving it — even if you disagree. You may feel happy, angry, confused, or frustrated by what you hear. Recognize that your reactions are about you, and not the other person. Lastly, express gratitude. Now that you have some new data, you can reflect on the meaning and implication of what you heard, consider what you need to work on, and make a plan of action.

As an executive coach, I work with many successful leaders who want to become even more effective. Recently, I asked a client of mine what kind of feedback she was receiving to help her be a better leader. She said, “My last performance review was really positive. My boss told me I’m doing a great job and I should just continue to do what I’m doing.”

That felt nice to hear, I’m sure. But it is also completely unhelpful to her growth and development.

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Why you have an accent in a foreign language - The Economist

OPEN A TEXTBOOK for a foreign language, and one of the first things you see is an alphabet, enumerating the letters used in the writing system and the sounds they represent. This is obviously crucial for unfamiliar systems, say those of Greek or Russian. But even for languages that rely on the Latin alphabet, the guide will explain how diacritics such as accent marks change a letter’s pronunciation, and quirks such as the -ch- in German or -gl- in Italian. (The first often sounds like the ch in Scottish loch, the second like the -ll- in million.)

And with that, it’s off to master greetings, vocabulary and so on, with little further thought for pronunciation. This is a shame. There is much more to learning a foreign accent than the sounds that the letters on the page represent. To begin with, the rough equivalents given in English are often quite rough indeed. In French, the p in Paris sounds rather different from the p in English, a contrast often neglected in textbooks: the French version lacks the strong puff of air of the English one. (Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say “Paris” in English. Then try making the p without the puff, and you’ll get the French kind.)

Even when textbooks or instructors mention this sort of nuance, the next step is often missing. As with chemistry, the important thing is not just how the elements behave in isolation, but how they come together. Each language has rules for these combinations, which native speakers (and many teachers) generally grasp but don’t or can’t explain.

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